Extraordinary Means

Do you like John Green? E. Lockhart? Jennifer Niven? Stephen Chbosky? How about Laurie Halse Anderson? This book is for you!

Extraordinary Means is a story about a boy named Lane, who is focused on getting good grades and dating his girlfriend.
But then after an illness called tuberculosis, makes his plans halt, he has to rethink his whole life plan. His once planned life has hit the brakes.Once Lane gets sent to a place called Latham House, he hardly knows what to do with himself. But after he meets a feisty girl named Sadie, who has tuberculosis, and likes to take pictures of people, places, and things, things start to change.

Lane doesn’t remember, but they had met before. At a different time, and different place.

Robyn Schneider’s book has humor, sarcasm and wit and sadness, all wrapped together in a bundle and called Extraordinary Means. I give this book a 70-80%

This is an excerpt from her story:

My first night at Latham House, I lay awake in my narrow, gabled room in Cottage 6 wondering how many people had died in it. And I didn’t just wonder this casually, either. I did the math. I figured the probability. And I came up with a number: eight. But then, I’ve always been terrible at math.

In fourth grade, we had to do timed tests for our multiplication tables. Five minutes a page, fifty questions each, and if you wanted to move on, you couldn’t make a single mistake. The teacher charted our progress on a piece of hot-pink poster board taped up for everyone to see, a smiley-face sticker next to our name for each table we completed. I watched as the number of stickers next to everyone else’s names grew, while I got stuck on the sevens. I did the flash cards every night, but it was no use, because it wasn’t the multiplication table that was giving me trouble. It was the pressure of being told two things: 1. That I only had a short amount of time, and 2. That I had to get everything right.

When I finally drifted off to sleep, I dreamed of houses falling into the ocean and drowning. The water swallowed them, but they rose up again from the black depths, rotting and covered in seaweed as they rode the waves back to shore, looking for their owners.
I’m an only child, so the prospect of using the communal bathroom was pretty horrifying. Which is why I set my alarm that first morning for six o’clock, tiptoeing down the hall with my Dopp kit and towel while everyone else was still asleep.

It was strange wearing shoes in the shower, being completely naked except for a pair of flip-flops. Washing my hair with shoes on, and doing it in a Tupperware container of a shower stall, felt so different from my normal Monday-morning routine that I wondered if I’d ever get used to it.

I used to sleep in at home, waiting until the last possible moment to roll out of bed, grope for a clean shirt, and eat a cereal bar on the drive to school. I’d listen to whatever songs were on the radio, not because I liked them, but because they were my tarot cards. If the songs were good, it would be a good day. If they were bad, I’d probably get a B on a quiz.

Image provided by GoodReads, and excerpt courtesy of HarperCollins.com